Steric scattering of rod-like swimmers in low Reynolds number environments

Microbes form integral components of all natural ecosystems. In most cases, the surrounding micro-environment has physical variations that affect the movements of micro-swimmers, including solid objects of varying size, shape and density. As swimmers move through viscous environments, a combination of hydrodynamic and steric forces are known to significantly alter their trajectories in a way that depends on surface curvature. In this work, our goal was to clarify the role of steric forces when rod-like swimmers interact with solid objects comparable to cell size. We imaged hundreds-of-thousands of scattering interactions between swimming bacteria and micro-fabricated pillars with radii from ∼1 to ∼10 cell lengths. Scattering interactions were parameterized by the angle of the cell upon contact with the pillar, and primarily produced forward-scattering events that fell into distinct chiral distributions for scattering angle - no hydrodynamic trapping was observed. The chirality of a scattering event was a stochastic variable whose probability smoothly and symmetrically depended on the contact angle. Neglecting hydrodynamics, we developed a model that only considers contact forces and torques for a rear-pushed thin-rod scattering from a cylinder - the model predictions were in good agreement with measured data. Our results suggest that alteration of bacterial trajectories is subject to distinct mechanisms when interacting with objects of different size; primarily steric for objects below ∼10 cell lengths and requiring incorporation of hydrodynamics at larger scales. These results contribute to a mechanistic framework in which to examine (and potentially engineer) microbial movements through natural and synthetic environments that present complex steric structure.